At 5:29 PM +0100 01/17/2006, Are Hansen wrote:
Somebody mentioned the importance of having lots of free HD space
with OSX, so it can shuffle inactive applications out to disk. But
if I have enough RAM, then OSX doesn't have to do this, or what?
I'm probably not going to explain this very well, but here goes:
You can never have enough RAM with Unix. :)
And Unix rarely leaves any memory idle for long.
Launch Activity Monitor. Set it to view All Processes and perhaps
sort on Virtual Memory. Compare the real and virtual memory columns.
At the bottom of the window, click on System Memory and note the
total VM size.
Real is the actual amount of RAM the process has allocated to it
*right now*. Virtual is the total amount of memory allocated -- much
of the excess all being in your swap files on the HD [*]. Everything
the process (application) sees is virtual. It has no way of really
knowing the difference of what's in real RAM and what's not. The
Memory Manager handles all that outside of the process' context. The
amount of real RAM allocated has nothing to do with the amount of
virtual memory allocated! The Memory Manager just makes sure there's
enough real memory loaded to keep the CPU busy.
Recently upgraded my iBook to 640 Mb RAM, and thought this would be
more than sufficient for a few smallish apps: Mail, Safari, mariner
Write? Even PhotoShop maybe? Or does PS ask for all the RAM there is?
It's not a case of "asking for RAM". App's can't do that. They just
ask for "memory space" and Unix creates it, even if it has to
dynamically create new swap files to hold it all!
It's that dynamic creation issue that makes it critical that there be
enough empty space available on your HD.
[*] Certain read-only segments of an application or run-time library
are not put into the swapfile. On page-out, they're simply deleted
from RAM. On page-in, they're re-obtained from the original app
files.
HTH,
- Dan.
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